This doesn't seem high to me at all. You buy the game, try it for an hour, feel kind of meh on it or even just see a different game you think you'd like even more, and hit the refund button. If anything, I'm surprised it's only ~12%.
Is it incredibly rare? We've seen time and time again in the last few years, really basic indie games overtake AAA games in sales on Steam. Schedule One is another one which had 450 thousand concurrent players not very long after its launch. It seems AAA game studios are missing what gamers want at every turn. There's an uptick in indie devs that have broken through the barriers with good gameplay despite the graphics not being AAA quality.
Edit other games that come to mind: Hollow Knight: Silksong, Hades II, Schedule 1, and R.E.P.O.
More obvious examples: Minecraft, Terraria, Factorio were all indie studios as far as I am aware. Minecraft being one of the most successful games at 350 million copies sold.
Those games are a grain of sand in the infinite desert that is the indie game world. The vast majority of indie games on Steam are barely even noticed by anyone.
Schedule One sold more copies than a brand new Assassins Creed game at launch on Steam, Minecraft has sold more copies than most AAA games, including GTA 5.
Yeah, sometimes I look back and think: Why didn’t they just choose to build a genre defining game? Next you’ll tell me that instead of just buying Bitcoin at $1k they chose to make yet another game.
I'm not claiming it's every indie game I'm saying its not quite as rare as you suggest, I look at new releases on Steam all the time, there's less indie games than you think being released. More than there probably should be, but its not like tens of thousands a day or week or even in a month. Its about 800 a month. That's rare if anything, not "incredibly rare"
And out of the 800 new indie games a month, how many are breakout successes and sell even 10k copies? That's what is rare, not that indie games are rare, but having a success (like winning the lottery) is relatively rare.
At 10k new indie games a year, maybe a dozen gross over a million. A larger studio can't afford those kind of odds. That said, they should be able to make more games with a better focus on gameplay and a bit less on leading tech graphics.
This. And honestly, 10k sales is the bare minimum. Even if you’re a solo dev with no team and you handle everything yourself (programming, sound, music, art, marketing) to keep costs down, you’re still looking at around 6–12 months of work.
Most indie games don’t sell for more than $10 USD, but let’s be generous and say you manage to convince your audience to pay $20.
Total: 200,000 USD
After Steam Cut: 140,000 USD
And now you need to get lightning to strike every year to maintain your annual income so you can retire before you're Methuselah.
Could you work on the game part-time while holding down a full-time job? Sure, but you've got to have some iron stamina to want to sit in front of a computer for another 4 hours after a full day of work. Furthermore, not being able to focus on the game means dev might take significantly longer.
I was thinking 10K copies as a metric for even modest "success" for a game, but you're right about the expenses and income... That said, depending on where you live, that's a pretty good income.
Indie games (which is just a tag you can add to your game) notwithstanding - the number of games released per month appears to be closer to double that.
There are thousands of new games each year. The handful lucky outstanding low-budget games won't put anyone to shame.
> There's an uptick in indie devs that have broken through the barriers with good gameplay despite the graphics not being AAA quality.
Don't confuse indie with AAA. Indie is about control, AAA about budget. There is usually a correlation between control and budget, but there are also many long-running indie-devs with good budget now. Supergiant, who made Hades 2 for example, are such an AA(A)-Indie.
> Edit other games that come to mind: Hollow Knight: Silksong, Hades II, Schedule 1, and R.E.P.O.
> More obvious examples: Minecraft, Terraria, Factorio were all indie studios as far as I am aware. Minecraft being one of the most successful games at 350 million copies sold.
Those are long-running, genre-defining games, which also received a good budget over the years. Many of them are in the realm of AA, probably AAA now. Those are naturally grown services-games which could grow from success to become even more successful. Big studies tried to emulate this in the last years, but ultimately failed big in most cases.
The general problem is, the bigger your budget, the bigger the anxiety, leading to more control, conservative micromanaging and throwing every shit into the game to cater as much people as possible, which in high numbers cannibalizes the market eventually. Low-budgets can take on more risks, focus on their gaming-mechanisms and don't have to sell big. Making small money to cover your costs is already good enough, and they all can always explode by luck if they get their marketing right.
Games like Schedule 1 or R.E.P.O. don't have to offer 100h+ of fancy fun and high level entertainment. People are happy if they can get their 10+ hours of fun out of it, because they didn't waste big money on it anyway. So you will always see cheap games occasionally explode for a short while, while everyone is waiting for the big games going on sale, especially when the cheap games are coming with a social aspect.
> It seems AAA game studios are missing what gamers want at every turn.
I’m really not sure what it is. Usually, when a company begins to abandon/shaft their user base like that, it’s because they found a more lucrative market to chase instead.
The Stardew guy spent five years not working, living off of the labor of his girlfriend.
Sure, take your shot, but it is unreasonable to think that many people have the opportunity to drop everything for a five year vision quest, hoping to come out the other side a financial success.
A winning lottery ticket would have an even better return on investment. Good luck with that business strategy.
(To be clear, Stardew Valley is a great game. But "making a breakout indie game" really does feel akin to winning the lottery to me, even if the game is fundamentally great.)
Your chances are much more higher building your own game than playing the lottery endlessly. You forget that guy who made Stardew Valley had to self-teach everything he knew, till he got to the point he quit his full time job. I don't see in what universe you have a better chance to win the lottery, than to build a successful indie game if you truly put your heart into it. Some of the greatest inventions didn't come to us because someone won the lottery, they experimented and kept going. Look at Duck Duck Go, he had 30 other projects that 'failed' before Duck Duck Go succeeded.
The lottery definitely has worse odds, I just don't think that's saying much.
If you want to create indie games—and you can make it work without quitting your day job—go for it! But I don't think it would be smart for EA or Ubisoft to, like, stop making big-budget games and make indie games instead. If you can make a breakout hit, you can make a huge profit—but you have to make a breakout hit, and that comes down to a lot of luck.
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Now, I do think it would make sense for EA/Ubisoft to try more mid-budget releases, which explore something new instead of continuing a 10+ year franchise. A lot of them will fail, but if a few are extremely successful, they could make up for the failures. It kind of felt like the publishers were doing this for a while (Grow Home, Little Nightmares) but my sense is that it has kind of stopped? Although caveat, I also haven't been following gaming as closely as I once did.
> A lot of them will fail, but if a few are extremely successful, they could make up for the failures. It kind of felt like the studios were doing this for a while (Grow Home, Little Nightmares) but my sense is that it has kind of stopped?
I think the problem comes from marketing budgets. For any given game a marketing budget can push some amount of sales, but applying a marketing budget to each game makes it much harder for the winners to make up losses on the rest.
Small releases also need to be 'lean' releases; management overhead is another cost that's hard to make up in scale.
Combined, large developers don't have any natural advantage at making small to mid-scale games, and their structures impose fixed costs that are hard to avoid. It would almost be better for large developers to get indie-scale games by funding partners who act outside of the corporate structure, but anybody can do that.
Hearthstone (Blizzard) is another rare exception of an indie-scale, in-house game that was a breakout hit that could not have come from the outside (because of the IP involved), but even that existed because it started as a "closet-scale" project with senior developers who insulated themselves from management pressures.
That's interesting, I think you're probably right.
> Combined, large developers don't have any natural advantage at making small to mid-scale games, and their structures impose fixed costs that are hard to avoid. It would almost be better for large developers to get indie-scale games by funding partners who act outside of the corporate structure, but anybody can do that.
The advantage would be funding. I love indie games but I do get tired of 2D pixel art. With just a bit more money—still an order of magnitude less than Call of Duty, mind you—the possibilities really expand.
I started playing Psychonauts 2 this week, and I think it's such an incredible game—and a great example of what can happen when an "indie" developer manages to secure a real budget. (I don't know if Double Fine is indie, but their games contain the sort of outside-the-box thinking I associate with indies.)
Perhaps some sort of YCombinator-esque model could actually work here.
> The lottery definitely has worse odds, I just don't think that's saying much.
Absolutely. People tend to assume that 95% of video games turn a profit, when it's the reverse. There are highly polished, incredibly high quality video games who simply just don't sell.
